‘It is an enormous pleasure to spend time with people of my choosing rather than to endure conversations out of obligation. I eat in restaurants alone. I watch whatever I want. I keep my own hours.’
Photograph: Jose Luis Pelaez Inc/Getty Images/Blend Images

There remains a pervasive notion that happiness can only truly come from finding a spouse, lest one rot of loneliness in some dusty attic. But a new study out of the University of California at Santa Barbara provides a very different view of singledom, one that this single woman finds enormously encouraging.

In work presented at the American Psychological Association’s 124th annual conference, Bella dePaulo suggests that single people may have more fulfilling social lives and experience greater psychological growth than some married people. She sifted through 814 studies and found data that showed that single people are more connected with family and friends, whereas marriage tends to make two people insular. She also found that the more self-sufficient single people were, the less likely they were to experience negative emotions. But with married people, greater self-sufficiency actually seemed tied to stress and difficulty.

DePaulo’s work is certainly timely. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2014 there were 124.6 million unmarried Americans over age 16, meaning 50.2% of the nation’s adult population was single. Compare that to 1976, when only 37.4% of American adults were single.

I’m 35, and single by choice for the first time in 20 years. That means that from 1996 to 2016, I was always in a relationship or chasing a relationship. I was also going to high school, finishing college, completing a master’s degree, working various jobs, publishing books, and lots of other things. But underlying it all, even my passionate love for my work, was the deep-seated belief that I must have a partner in order to be a complete or worthy being. I never applied that thinking to anyone else. I just knew that I wasn’t good enough to be alone.

My constant pursuit of relationships stemmed from my own fear of being with myself. I grew up with severe depression and anxiety, resulting in flare-ups of agoraphobia and even suicidal thinking. I grew accustomed to relying on the intervention of friends and family, as well as mental health professionals. It saved my life, but I felt in my core that I was broken and unfit for adulthood. I must need to be supervised at all times, right? Monitored. Accompanied. Just in case it got bad again. Just in case the medication stopped working. Just in case my brain did what it does sometimes.

The result was that I sometimes chose relationships that were deeply unhealthy. As long as somebody kept hanging out with me, I could endure emotional abuse, gaslighting, and all the rest of the fun that humans sometimes do to the ones they claim they love. I could get smacked in the face and stick with somebody because hey, maybe I deserved it for being an unworthy creature. I could be used for perceived professional or personal connections. I could also ignore my own missteps, failings and garbage behavior.

It’s tempting to blame somebody else for everything. It’s tempting to blame oneself for everything. The truth is generally more nuanced.

One cannot truly be happy if one is always dependent on someone else for emotional and financial resources. And I know very well that being depended upon for love, money, etc. does not make for a joyful union. After choosing one too many imbalanced situations, I figured I ought to stop focusing on other people’s issues and start figuring out what the hell was wrong (and right) with me.

I cried a lot for awhile, because when you stack relationships on top of each other for two decades, you never properly mourn what you’ve lost along the way. I reflected on wonderful times with wonderful people and terrible times with terrible people (there was a lot of crossover). I thought about the ways in which I had been wonderful, and terrible, and sometimes just mediocre. It’s been painful to acknowledge all this, but what I’m left with is a strange sense of gratitude, even when I’m crying or lonely or really, really angry.

Opinion writers at the Guardian and elsewhere don’t get to craft our own headlines. But if I did one for this piece, mine might say: “BEING SINGLE IS SO MUCH BETTER THAN I THOUGHT IT WOULD BE!”

I have indeed found a greater connection to family and friends since I bowed out of the commitment industrial complex. It is an enormous pleasure to spend time with people of my choosing rather than to endure conversations out of obligation. I eat in restaurants alone. I watch whatever I want. I keep my own hours. I do some political volunteer work. I took a real vacation with my family for the first time in years. It isn’t any fun when I’m sick and have to take care of myself, but it is very fun indeed when I decide to binge-watch Veep in the middle of the night, just because I can. I’m learning to cook. I’m eating better. I talk to my friends and I laugh a lot. I joined a yoga studio like some kind of Lululemon-clad monster (I cannot afford Lululemon, but will be starting a crowdfunding campaign for their magic butt pants shortly).

People sometimes ask if I’m on dating apps. I’m not, although I did get “waitlisted” ie politely rejected by Raya, which I prefer to call Illuminati Tinder. I’m open to going on more dates. I’m not a celibate ascetic shut up in some mysterious cabin atop a high mountain. But I’m not chasing it anymore. And that feels really awesome.

At the APA Conference, DePaulo didn’t recommend the coupled life over the single life, or vice versa. She said, “There is no one blueprint for the good life. What matters is not what everyone else is doing or what other people think we should be doing, but whether we can find the places, the spaces and the people that fit who we really are and allow us to live our best lives.”

I can say now, finally, from actual personal experience, that she’s absolutely right.